With that background, it is interesting to see media pundits describe a sense of reality seeping back into Indian debate, point to the stock market swoon immediately after the announcement and concentrate on the one part of the story they have gotten right -- the strange failure of the CIA to notice the preparations for the test.
The blindness to Indian public policy is not confined to the CIA. Inspite of the fact that many of the news organizations have English versions of their newspapers and magazines, inspite of the fact that a simple perusal of these could have indicated the mood of the country, the media got things completely wrong.
Incidentally, that is not limited to stories about a far-away country. For all its freedom, American media organizations are like lemmings in reporting identical viewpoints. In any given week, news articles will alternate between saying that Social Security is dying and saying that the doomsayers are exaggerating. The funny thing is that most articles in a given week will hold to the same position. The problem is that of size; big news organizations distribute the news and effectively control the news because the slant is done by relatively few people. So, if one person reports that Indians celebrated in the streets, the media will pick it up and broadcast it as fact. A mistake in perception by one reporter is enough to bias all reportage of an event.
